The Seattle Art Museum lost its chief curator last week (Lisa Corrin leaves in October to be director at Williams College Museum of Art in Williamstown, Mass). With SAM working on major expansion with a space-doubling addition and a big new sculpture park, the timing isn’t great…
Tag: 05.18.05
Philly Heads To Asia
The Philadelphia Orchestra is about to embark on a massive three-week tour of the Far East, and there’s little question that they’re going all out to impress the concertgoers of South Korea, Japan, China, Singapore, Hong Kong, and Taiwan. Superstar soloists Yo-Yo Ma and Lang Lang will be the featured attractions, and an exhausting set of three complete Mahler symphonies will form the backbone of the tour repertoire, as well as the core of a live-to-tape recording the orchestra intends to release after the tour from concert tapes taken in Tokyo. The cost of the tour, large even by major orchestra standards, is $3 million.
Mountain Laurel, Take Two
The $35 million Mountain Laurel Performing Arts Center in Pennsylvania’s Pocono Mountains was a grand plan that quickly became an unmitigated disaster, going out of business less than a year after opening amid accusations of incompetence and misuse of public funds. But “the complex, which was built with the help of a $15 million state grant, is reopening with a fresh infusion of public money, including $500,000 from the state and $750,000 in projected annual revenue from a new hotel tax in Pike County.” Gone, however, are most of Mountain Laurel’s original grand plans, such as playing summer host to the Pittsburgh Symphony. This summer’s lineup includes mostly “blues, pop, rock, country, jazz and Latin music, genres that typically attract healthy audiences, in hopes of meeting ambitious attendance goals and buying more time to stabilize the center’s finances.”
Surrealist Paintings Tied Up In Mexican Court
Three dozen paintings by esteemed surrealist Remedios Varo are in legal limbo in Mexico. “The dispute centers on who owns 39 paintings first lent and then given to Mexico City’s Museum of Modern Art in 1999 by Walter Gruen, an Austrian and also a World War II refugee who was Varo’s supporter and lover the last 11 years of the artist’s life. Varo’s niece Beatriz Varo Jimenez of Valencia, Spain, has contended in a Mexico City family court that she is Varo’s rightful heir and that Gruen had no right to give the works to the museum. The niece won a crucial judicial round in March. But Mexico’s National Institute of Fine Arts is claiming that the works are state patrimony and is appealing the verdict.”
New Jersey Arts Center To Be Shuttered
Facing a possible zeroing out of the state funds that keep it afloat, the South Jersey Performing Arts Center located on Camden’s waterfront has announced plans to shut down by June 30. The SJPAC was to be the crown jewel in Camden’s civic rebirth, but the plan has fallen far short of expectations, with the city continuing to struggle, and the arts center never attracting the audiences organizers had hoped for. The center, on the Delaware River just across from Philadelphia, has been open for nine years.
Where’s The Conservative Backlash?
“After the forced closure of Gurpreet Kaur Bhatti’s play ‘Behzti’ in December, two things were widely predicted. One was that theatres would become more conservative in their programming of potentially contentious Asian work (particularly on religious and sexual themes). The other was that it would be more difficult for theatres to retain an already fragile (and tiny) non-white audience.” In fact, neither has happened…